Dust
by Antigone2
Summary: What if Usagi didn't survive the R movie? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.


Sailor Teleport back to Earth almost drains them completely, with only four senshi to power the teleport of themselves, Mamoru, and the body of their fallen.

* * *

Minako hangs up the phone and heads right to the shrine.

 _"Minako. Just come."_

It wouldn't be an easy thing for Rei to say under normal circumstances but considering Rei hasn't actually spoken out loud in two days makes it all that more extraordinary. Makes it all that more urgent.

"Rei, you called me..?" Minako sits down beside her friend. The other girl is silent, still staring at the flames with a blank, empty expression. Minako doesn't ask if Rei is okay. None of them are okay. Minako thinks they may never be okay again.

The Earth is safe, anyway. Billions of lives go on as if nothing happened, people not realizing how close they came to annihilation, and, worse, completely ignorant of the sacrifice made for them. It'd be easy to hate them, all of them. But Usagi wouldn't have wanted that.

"Rei?" Minako said, again. "You asked me to come here."

Violet eyes shifted over to blue ones. Rei's expression barely shuttered, but she reached over and grabbed Minako's hand, gripping it so her knuckles were white.

"Don't go anywhere," Rei says, her voice hoarse from lack of use.

"I won't," Minako promises.

But they both now know how easily such promises are broken.

* * *

Dr. Mizuno makes an effort to be around in the first few days after her daughter's friend's mysterious death, but is wholly unprepared to deal with her grieving daughter. Her uncomfortable hovering eventually gives way to a return to routine, and work, where she could deal with death in a more controlled, distant way.

Makoto lets herself into Ami's condo with the security code she memorized.

As usual, Ami is bent over her desk, her pen scribbling furiously, equations and notes and theories. Books are piled all over her bed. Books about the afterlife, alternate universes, time dilation, trauma, the grieving process.

Makoto swallows against the burning in her throat. "Ami?" her voice is soft, gentle.

"Mako-chan," the tone is clipped. "I'm busy, can you come back?"

"Ami, have you eaten today? Showered?" Makoto looks at the book-strewn bed. "Slept?"

"Makoto-"

A strong hand curls around hers, ceasing the movement of the pen. "Ami."

The smaller girl struggles against her friend, "Let go! Mako-chan let... I AM BUSY!"

"Ami, this makes no sense," Makoto lifts the paper, covered in scribbles, a mess of German, English and Japanese, a jumble of math and lines. She repeats herself, firmly. "Have you slept?"

"I'm trying to make _sense of this_ , Mako-chan," Ami tries to pull her hand back, and pen falls to floor. "Just let me do that!"

"You can't!" Makoto cries, letting go of Ami to throw her arms out wide. "I know death, Ami! I know grief! I know it and there is _no figuring your way out of it."_

"Yes, there is!" she shouts back, "There has to be!" She scrambles for her pen, gathers up her papers. Her fingers are mess of blisters, raw and bleeding.

Makoto is crying again, it seems like all she does these days is cry.

"I am going to figure out ... figure this all out... understand..." Ami lists, just slightly, against the taller girl. Makoto gathers Ami in her arms and holds her tightly.

"I'm afraid to cry," Ami whispers. "Because if I start, I'll never stop. I'll never stop crying."

"It's true," Makoto says, through her tears. "You never stop. Not really."

* * *

And she was right.

Ami's tears finally come at Usagi's funeral, and she cries and cries and never stops. Not really.

* * *

They don't really let fourteen year old schoolgirls just waltz into psychiatric hospitals, which is why it's really handy that Minako recently inherited a disguise pen.

"It's me, Minako," she says, just in case he can't see the through the disguise. "I hear you are responding now." It's easy to make her voice encouraging, to treat this as some minor injury - a broken leg instead of a broken soul. "Not 'catatonic' anymore?"

Mamoru's eyes shift to her and he rolls them, just slightly. It's enough to make her smile through the tears that she won't allow to come.

"Rei's been asking about you," she says. _Well, she would if she was speaking more than a couple words a day,_ Minako amends in her mind. "Ami and Makoto too, of course."

Mamoru's expression softens a little, and he nods. There is still an IV snaked into his arm - fluids until he could start to eat and drink again. According to the doctors, this wasn't an entirely unheard of response to a trauma like this. According to the doctors, they were optimistic. Sympathetic.

Minako is mostly jealous. She's fought the urge to join Mamoru in unresponsive, vacant stares more than once during the past couple of weeks.

"Do you want me to leave?"

His movements are so slight as to be barely noticeable, but Minako can read the half-shrug. _Not really._

"Can I talk?"

A nod and shrug. _If you want._

"About her?"

He slides his eyes toward her and it's a few moments before he nods.

"I just think-" Minako looks at her hands and sighs. "Princess Serenity - I mean, if that all hadn't gone to shit, she'd have lived and died millennia ago and the world would be none the wiser, right? Usagi was reborn to defeat Beryl and she did that. Ya know? In a way, Usagi got to accomplish her life's purpose. Maybe she was lucky."

"The enemies we were fighting - the Black Moon or whatever they called themselves - they are just disappeared, right? That little girl we knew nothing about? She's gone too. Like, everything is peaceful and fine and maybe this was exactly what was supposed to happen. Maybe Usagi Tsukino was born just to die. To use the last of the ancient crystal just to save the world?"

Mamoru's eyes are intense when Minako meets them. She chokes on her words but they come out without a hint of shaking, intense and dark and completely sincere:

"Mamoru, _I'd watch the entire world burn if it means she'd come back."_

And then she cries, and it's not Ami's silent tears or Makoto's honest sobs or Rei's constant seething. It's wailing in anguish and clawing at her hair and _screaming_.

It drowns out the first words Mamoru has spoken in over two weeks. "I would too."

* * *

Luna spends time at Minako's house, with Artemis. She spends more time sleeping on Usagi's bed. Eventually the Tsukinos will tearfully strip the room, and then Luna doesn't know what she'll do.

* * *

Motoki and Unazuki accompany Mamoru home. The doctors have declared him mentally sound; Mamoru wonders what their basis for comparison is. But moving and talking no longer feel like monumental tasks, he no longer counts every single beat of his heart, although he still resents each one.

Unazuki is talking, her feminine, calm voice directing Motoki toward some menial task in the kitchen, asking questions with rising inflections that Mamoru forces himself to understand.

"What?"

"Are you sure you'll be okay... by yourself?" she glances uneasily at her brother. Mamoru knows what she means, some part of him acknowledges he should appreciate her concern, but the last two words just echo in his mind until he can hear nothing else.

"Should I stay? You won't do anything stupid?" Motoki is kind-hearted as they come, but not one to mince words.

"No," he answers. "And no." He wants nothing more than to follow Usako to the unreachable depths where she'd gone, but he's only alive because she isn't. Staying that way is his penance.

It's an effort to follow his friends with his eyes, to force their speech from empty sounds to just as empty words.

Mamoru thinks of Minako, screaming and pulling on her hair, grief real and raw and rising up from her skin like a fever. He suddenly wishes for that release, to break everything in his apartment including his own traitorous, living body.

Instead he smiles, that sad smile reserved for funerals and sympathetic murmurings. The smile he'd seen on other's faces when talking to him many times in his life. He smiles and he assures his friends he will be fine. He tells them good night, instead of good bye, to ease their worries.

Entering his bedroom is a mistake. It's been weeks, but her scent still lingers. It brings him to his knees. He feels her hand, her cheek on his knee, hears her voice in his ear. _'It's okay Mamo-chan, I'll be your family now. You aren't alone anymore.'_

This is what grief is like when you remember.

 _'I won't die.'_

His pillow is damp before he realizes he's crying, _finally crying_ , and all he can do is accuse the emptiness where Usako isn't: "Liar."

There is a physical ache under Mamoru's ribcage, always. His psyche reaches out, searching, always searching. He finds only cold and dizzying _nothing._ He still reaches, for the rest of his life. Eventually, it's not because he's looking for her, but because that nothing is what he has instead.

* * *

Rei has a dream that she walks into her room and Usagi is there, sitting on her bed, flipping through her manga. "Hey, Rei," she says, smiling.

"Usagi? How...?"

Usagi blinks at the expression on Rei's face, tilts her head to the side with a giggle. "What's wrong?"

"You're dead, Usagi," Rei whispers, and even in her dream she's yelling at herself not to break this spell. "You died."

Her laugh sounds real enough, alive enough. Her eyes are sparkling. "Rei, you are so silly! We always come back!"

"Like after D-point?" she breathes. Of course. Of _course. Usagi came back. You knew she'd come back.  
_

Usagi springs forward, and it's only after Rei's arms close around her does she realize the girl's body is cold, her flesh somehow both softening and stiffing in a horrible way. Just like when they pried her from Mamoru's arms on the asteroid.

Only then does she realize she's holding a corpse.

She wakes up screaming, every time.

* * *

Time insists on passing.

Mamoru moves to America, Ami to Germany. Rei wishes them luck.

No matter where you go on planet Earth, the moon follows you.

* * *

"But I don't think that's right," Minako says, loudly and punctuating the air with a beer bottle she probably shouldn't be carrying through city streets. Makoto is laughing, supporting Minako as best she can, the karaoke music still ringing in her ears. They are all smiling, enjoying themselves.

The lights of the sleazy Kabuki-cho district make the night like day, you can't see the sky, there are no stars.

"What's not right?" Rei scoffs, trying and failing to pretend her steps are steady.

"'From the earth we came, to the earth we return...' That's the saying, right? About death?" She probably has it wrong. But the heaviness falls over the three so suddenly and unexpectedly no one corrects her turn of phrase.

"But she _didn't_ come from Earth, ya know?," Minako continues, looking at Makoto with half-lidded, intense eyes. "Usagi. Not originally. She was sent from ... up there and..."

"And she's there now?" Rei rolls her eyes, tries to pretend talking about Usagi is natural, normal, right. They do bring her up, from time to time. They have to.

"How do you know she's not?" the blonde challenged. "Up on the moon in that... stone thing with Queen Serenity. Hanging out in the ol' kingdom just watching over us... Not in the ground. Never in the ground."

"Minako-" Rei's voice is a warning.

"Like Princess Kaguya, right? She had to go back. Home."

Minako wilts and Makoto shrugs up her weight with a slight grunt. "C'mon, girl. Speaking of home, let's get you to yours."

That night Makoto doesn't sleep, she goes to the roof of her building and looks at the sky for hours.

* * *

The incense stick drops slightly toward the side of the holder, the smoke tendriling up into the heavy summer air. It's a week until Obon, the cemetery is quiet.

The grave in front of Rei was cleaned just lately. There isn't a pink rose resting nearby, so it wasn't Makoto. Probably Shingo on his way home from work one day, or maybe Mrs. Tsukino had made the trip to her daughter's resting place, although walking is getting more difficult for her these days.

Minako won't come. Mamoru used to, before he moved away, every time it stormed. "She's afraid of thunder," he'd explained, once. And Rei had nodded as if it made perfect sense. She left an umbrella resting against the stone, but after Mamoru had left Japan for good, it rusted through and someone had thrown it away. That was a long ago, now.

Evening is falling over the city like a blanket. Rei watches the incense smoke curl and thinks about the snatches of visions she gets now and then - a slightly older Chibi-Usa and a glittering crystal city. Other senshi, a door to time. Chaos and its unnamed opposite (Rei's mind supplies the word 'serenity') coiling up in the corner of the universe, slumbering. Things which might have been, a future that isn't, enemies that need not come, now.

Makoto has a small cafe in Ebisu, all red-brick and European desserts. Minako eats there every week, and Rei joins them. Ami keeps in touch almost religiously, and visits Japan a few times a year. It's always good to see her but each time it feels like less of her returns. Mamoru sends postcards to Rei, and to Ami, too. The cards say very little. He has two advanced degrees. As far as Rei knows, he never married.

Their lives are uncomplicated. Rei wonders if her visions are what _should_ have happened, or should not have. Or maybe they are from another universe- a complicated, devastating, dangerous - _beautiful_ \- universe, where Usagi Tsukino lives. Rei aches for that place.

For twenty-five O-bon festivals Rei has imagined - briefly, vividly - her old friend walking toward her, following the glowing lanterns home from the land of the dead.

What would she say, all bright eyes and odango'ed hair, laughing in her school uniform?

 _"Rei-chan, look at you! You've gotten so old!"_

Her girlish laughter aches in Rei's ears, an echo of an echo.

The stick is burned up, the grave is silent, empty stone. A crow caws and the sky darkens.

Rei turns toward home.


End file.
